Pyp

A quick-tongued former mummer's boy of the Night's Watch, with big ears and a talent for mimicry, sworn to the Wall alongside Jon and Grenn.

The fuller tale

Pypar — Pyp to everyone — comes to the Wall from a mummers’ troupe, which makes him that rarest of recruits: one whose crime was a talent. The story he tells is that a lord’s son took offense; the story he performs is everything else, for Pyp can do every accent in the Seven Kingdoms and most of the officers’ voices, and a cell of frightened recruits needs a jester more than it needs another sword.

He is the quick half of the Watch’s gentlest friendship, paired with big, patient Grenn in an endless double act of insults and loyalty, and one of the first to close ranks around Jon Snow and then around Sam. It is Pyp’s ear for men — a mummer reads a room the way a maester reads a book — that makes him useful beyond the japes: he knows which brothers can be trusted, which are dangerous, and precisely how far Ser Alliser can be pushed, information of real value in a fortress full of knives.

When the war comes to Castle Black he stands his watch with the rest, a slight man with a bow on a wall built for giants. The Watch has no use for what Pyp was and every use for what he chooses to be, which is the order’s whole wager on its broken men stated small: the mummer’s boy holds the Wall.

The page and the screen

In the books Pyp survives — he fights through the siege of Castle Black and is alive as the published story leaves the Wall, grumbling in company with Grenn. The show kills him at the gate, an arrow in the throat during the wildling assault, largely to give the battle a cost the audience feels by name. The books also give his election-night self more to do: Pyp and Grenn are part of the whispering campaign that helps Sam maneuver Jon into the Lord Commandership, the mummer’s gifts turned at last to politics.

Where they stand, season by season

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The show: Fell in the battle for the Wall (S4·E9)

The mummer's boy who could never shoot took Ygritte's arrow through the throat in the battle for Castle Black, and died in Sam's arms with the fight still roaring around them.

His show death comes in the battle for Castle Black, and the arrow is Ygritte’s. Manning the wall of the yard, Pyp takes the shaft through the throat and dies in Samwell Tarly’s arms, frightened and quick and far too young, while the fight roars on without pausing for him — the battle’s first hard lesson that this night will be paid for by name. He is alive in the published books.